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Showtime's lovable serial killer is back Sunday night, October 2 for another journey with his Dark Passenger, and Michael C. Hall and the creative team behind the series are offering up some blood-spattered clues as to what to expect.

“There is a sense of a fresh start,” Hall tells PopcornBiz. “I think Dexter's returning to form in a sense. He's as close to the Dexter we met at the beginning of the series, but all that water is now under the bridge. It's still a much more complicated proposition.”

Part of the reason for the renewed attitude is that the show’s popped ahead in time one year and let some of the more recent horrors to bedevil Dexter recede into the past and let him begin to move into a new future –one likely filled with fresh horrors. “It couldn't be more different than the step we took last season when we picked up immediately after Rita's dead,” says Hall. “You're able to make decisions about how the character has changed, what doors he's closed, what doors he's reopened.”

Executive producer Sara Colleton explains the show’s writers “made a conscious decision to jump ahead a year, just so that when we meet up with Dexter as the season opens he is resolved these things. He's gotten over his heartbreak, if you will. And he's got his game on.”

“He's finished his year of atonement and he's now just back to his game which is his Dark Passenger, his life as a blood spatter analyst and his own life as a dad” Colleton elaborates. “Every year we always just try to pick a theme for the season and then come up with a plot that illustrates that theme. Dexter now knows that he will always have his Dark Passenger, and he knows he doesn’t want to pass that Dark Passenger onto his son – but he doesn’t know yet what he DOES want to pass onto his son.”

“He's open to some things that he wouldn't otherwise be open to or interested in,” adds Hall. “Dexter himself is perfectly fine going along the way he's been going along, but once he recognizes an obligation to not only keep things from his son but an obligation to give some things to his son, he realizes that he maybe needs to open himself up for Harrison's sake to the notion of cultivating a spiritual life in the boy. And that, as things in Dexter's world often do, becomes a magnet that attracts a lot of stuff.”

“Dexter” typically drafts a strong guest star to go toe-to-toe with Hall throughout the season’s overarching storyline, and actor Colin Hanks (“Mad Men”) joins the cast. “I play a man by the name of Travis who works at a museum. He cleans up ancient artifacts. And that's really about all I can say, legally,” laughs Hanks.

We can reveal a little more: Hanks shares most of his early screen time with another heavy-hitting guest star, Edward James Olmos. Buck says Olmos plays “an equally mysterious character who goes by the name of Professor Gellar. We also have Billy Brown playing a new detective in the office. We have Mos Def playing someone who is sort of a street preacher who crosses Dexter's path.”

Hall believes there’s a reason why Dexter’s come full circle, in a sense – though he doesn’t expect him to stay there. “Dexter is someone who we see over the course of the life of the show indulge in or play at what it means to be someone in a love relationship, someone confronting his demons in front of a group of fellow addicts, whatever it is,” says Hall. “But what's interesting about the character, as he attempts those things, succeeds or fails at those things, lives through those things, we see – and I think you see him pointedly do it at the end of the fifth season – he has this ability to unplug from that experience and somehow work it in his mind as something that didn't humanize him as much as it made him a more effective killer.”

“And in the sixth season he's really put a lot to bed – at least when we first meet him – and is killing efficiently and without conflict," he adds, "in a way that perhaps harkens back to where he was when we first meet him.”

"Dexter" season six premieres Sunday, October 2 at 9 PM ET on Showtime